Voice Search Is Catching On With Young Adults; T-Mobile Offers A Special Plan To Seniors

Voice search may feel like a far-off frontier to most marketers, but it’s already run-of-the-mill behavior for consumers, especially young adults. There are about 50 million voice-activated devices in US homes, mostly Amazon’s Alexa-enabled speakers, and voice queries have quickly grown to a fifth or more of US mobile queries for Google and iOS. Many brands are setting themselves up to win in the voice market by beefing up their non-voice SEO. “In the near term, [organic search] is going to be the way to get your brands represented for Google Home,” 360i President Jared Belsky tells Adweek. More.

Age Before Beauty

T-Mobile introduced a deal for subscribers over 55 with no kids on the plan, which halves the regular cost of a two-phone household contract. The pricing works for the network operator because older people don’t have the same appetite for data-draining video. Once they’re subscribers, older people tend to return a lot of value. AOL email accounts retained value long after losing their cool factor because those users tend to be older (and thus have a higher net worth and higher average spending). “Seniors represent a unique business opportunity for wireless companies,” writes Scott Moritz for Bloomberg, because they boost the all-important total subscriber score without straining the network. More.

Brand Aid

Some manufacturers are pushing back on Amazon by prioritizing local retailers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Luxottica, for example, sets minimum ad price thresholds for Oakley and Ray-Ban sunglasses to keep Amazon from undercutting retailers. And stroller brand UPPABaby offers free tune-ups when buyers purchase at retail locations. But all these efforts may be for naught, as Amazon continues to drive down prices and box out retailers through its private label brands. According to Quartz, Amazon owns 19 brands that sell exclusively on the platform that fail to disclose their relationship with the ecommerce owner anywhere on the site. Amazon thinks dissociating itself from its in-house brands will help them compete more effectively. “There are limits to the Amazon brand that Amazon would be wise not to cross,” says Mark DiMassimo, CEO of agency DiMassio Goldstein. More.

ShareTube

YouTube users can now share videos with friends and in group chats without leaving the platform, the company said in a blog post. With a messaging feature, YouTube is angling to gain back some of the attention generated around its videos from social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But those companies already know a lot about their users’ social networks, whereas YouTube would have to build those connections from the ground up, argues Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. More.